We, the Survivors

Disappointing compared to earlier novels HarmonySilkFactory + Billionaire

If you read FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE—as I have, and loved it, as I did, the first thing you’ll notice in this new novel by Tash Aw is that these two books are quite different in scope and depth. FSB was what I would call literary mainstream. But WE, THE SURVIVORS is more intimate, literary, and not so mainstream. It’s for readers who can submerge into an enclosed, at times crushing portrait of a Malaysian man’s life, ruled by poverty as a child, who tried to rise above and maintain a decent level of equitable improvement. Ah Hock wanted a middle-class life and ended up in prison for killing a man. And this is his story to an educated, worldly reporter after his stint in prison, the story of his life.This isn’t a mystery or thriller; the story of homicide is less poignant than the story of Ah Hock’s survival, ambition, and his struggling rise from poverty in a village 50 miles from Kuala Lumpur. He grew up in the 1980s, in a village that was isolated before industrialization led to bridges, roads, and passages closer to the city.Ah Hock’s obscure beginnings relied on fishing and later the fish factories. His father left for Singapore when he was young and never returned, leaving his mother to fend for them. Her own evolution was rough, but she did teach Ah Hock the will to survive above all. After he met a friend of sorts, Keong, a much older boy that was a hustler and wannabe gangster, Ah Hock began to develop his own kind of values and attitude related to the word at large. His ambition in youth was to be a tycoon, but as he matured, he longed to work in a comfortable job with a nice salary, and find a good wife. Although he tried to shake off his association with Keong, the hustler would reappear in his life, a magnet for trouble. Keong still wanted his big dreams of becoming a tycoon.This is not a fast paced or action-packed book. It is a measured, unhurried, and nonlinear portrayal of a young man’s life, and the choices he made. The author explores themes of heritage, hope, and fate, as well as attitudes toward immigrants and the implications of the class system. But it never patronizes or preaches. Tash Aw is a keen writer who gives a finely wrought depiction of one man’s life of hope and dreams. “The more we longed for something, the more impossible it became. You only dream about things you can never obtain.”There are also subtle things about the rhythms of village life, the effects of modernization on outlook, and the desire for obscurity by Ah Hock’s ancestors who lived through war and preferred invisibility to transparency, and how fate shapes our character. Besides Ah Hock, we are intimately drawn in to the lives of the people he’d known—family, friends, wife, workers, acquaintances. Many of the passages were penetrating, painful, flanged with regret—but often with the bittersweet tides of hope.“What she’d hated back then, she now loved: the sense of continuity, of surrendering…the pulling in of her horizons, the comfort to be found in the death of ambition.”Thank you to the publishers of Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending me a copy.

Absolutely perfect. I especially enjoyed the back and forth with various periods of the narrator's life -- it flowed beautifully and added such depth to the story.

The most impressive novel concerning rural Asia since V.S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds.